


Cooking Up An Angle

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Developing Friendship, Spark-minion relationships, people die in Castle Heterodyne all the time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 02:28:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15698256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: Wherein Professor Mezzasalma fails to steal a minion, but discovers the true meaning of friendship.





	Cooking Up An Angle

\---

"And who is this?"

"This," Mittelmind informed them, "is my best minion, Fraulein Snaug."

The girl was practically quivering, for all that she kept a brave smile on. Mezzasalma wondered what she had done to end up here. Most minions were let loose if the Baron captured their masters, and most Sparks dealt badly with the loss, ranting and raving about having to fetch their own tools and eventually walking backwards into a pit trap without someone to shout a warning, or some similarly idiotic demise. It was that sort of foolishness that had left Mezzasalma the senior Spark, after only eight months in the castle.

"Enchanté," he said, and gave her a friendly smile. "Welcome to Castle Heterodyne. Would you be interested in upgrading to eight eyes?"

"I - don't think so." Fraulein Snaug was twisting her hands together, glancing at Mittelmind out of the corner of her eyes. "I like the eyes I already have."

"Limbs?" He lifted his own metal forelegs to demonstrate. "Would you like spinnerets? I have an excellent biological adaptation formula with hardly _any_ chance of catastrophic bone dissolution -"

Diaz, of course, chose that moment to interrupt. "Give the _señorita_ a little time! It would be terrible if she had your spinnerets installed before she had a _chance_ to realize my infinite chain pulleys are _vastly_ superior!"

Interfering imbecile. Mezzasalma turned beseechingly to Mittelmind. "Getwin, you know my work, tell her it's far better than this clod's external -"

The girl cleared her throat. Somehow it was loud enough to silence the Sparks, and the watching mob of ordinary prisoners took a step back. Fraulein Snaug had a hand raised like a child with a question. "Er," she said, and jerked her chin up. "Actually, I'm _Doctor Mittelmind's_ minion. So he's the only one allowed to experiment on me, and he promised there would only be _psychological_ trauma. Er." She blinked a few times. "  
You call him Getwin?"

Mittelmind laid a proprietary hand on her shoulder. "He and I were on a thesis committee together once," he explained. "In Florence. Two buildings exploded. It was glorious."

One of the ordinary prisoners, a blue-haired ex-pirate whose name Mezzasalma probably should bother learning since she'd survived three months, coughed meaningfully. "We think there's an empty chemical lab down the Corridor of Green Spikes. Maybe the three of you working together could reach it?"

Bright lady, trying to take them all out at once.

\--

A week later, the chemical lab was mostly clean, and they'd disabled all the traps on the way except that giant swinging blade right next to the door, for privacy's sake. Snaug was a hard and cheerful worker, it turned out. And she made sure they all had rubber boots on before she went over the floor with hydrochloric acid. Very helpful.

She was certainly taking her time about coming back with specimens, though.

"I'm sure she'll be fine," Mezzasalma said, and clapped a reassuring hand on his colleague's arm before his abstracted wave could knock over the resonance inhibitor. "Knife-and-fork spiders aren't even poisonous."

"My dear, it's not the poison that concerns me. It's the _layout_. Did you see what's-his-name's floor plan -"

"Nuewenhoek, and given that he was crushed by a chandelier in a room he'd marked dead, I don't believe we can trust his judgement on these matters."

Mittlemind waved off the objection. "My point is, the castle layout is considerably similar to a maze! And the collapsed walls and impassable traps constitute an addition of walls, but effectively at random, rather than in a purposeful attempt at intellectual stimulation!" He was taking advantage of his fragile human legs to dance into the corner and take over the chalkboard; Mezzasalma considered leaping over the pile of junked equipment to interrupt, but it would be undignified. Besides, there was another chalk stuck in the methane nozzle. He pulled it out and hoped that upstream valve wasn't as corroded as it looked. Mittelmind was going on about the shape of the castle as he sketched, throwing in architectural terms as though he'd actually _studied_ it. It took him a few minutes to get the sketch complete enough that Mezzasalma could lean over and circle the location of the secondary spider nest, and then he looked horribly offended. "Pray don't interrupt my -" 

" _That_ is where she is going. _This_ \- " Mezzasalma slammed an X in two violent strokes at the location of the lab - "is where we are. If anything goes wrong, we will hear her screaming."

"I think you forget something, _amigo_ ," put in Diaz. It made Mezzasalma scuttle back a step in surprise; he'd quite forgotten Diaz was there. "The walls here, they are solid stone. Half a meter thick."

They looked at each other. 

"Well," Mittelmind finally offered with what Mezzasalma felt was undue cheer, "if anything goes wrong, she has the hydroxyl gun. Come on, gentlemen, let's get started on my spider pens. It would be a pity not to take advantage of the unique research opportunities here _right away_."

As it turned out, Snaug got back while they were still installing the fly gates, black-eyed but otherwise cheerful. The Castle had walked her in circles for a while, she apologetically explained, but eventually she broke through a door and got back on track.

Suspiciously nice of it. Mezzasalma wondered if the Castle had taken a shine to her.

\--

"Give me one good reason," the moron with the eyepatch - maybe not a moron in absolute terms, he'd knocked over nine milliner's shops in seven cities before the Baron's men caught up to him, but certainly by the standards of Castle Heterodyne - said to their newest comrade.

The newest comrade was middle-aged, balding, and had the expression of someone who'd had students. "Because," he began brandishing the rolled-up paper again, "I'm the man who'll decide when you get out of here."

"Not good enough," the moron declared, and there was a sudden blur of motion. Something went clang. A silverish streak flew away and bounced off Mezzasalma's front right knee. The idiot fell to the floor, gurgling. 

Only to be expected, really. There was a reason Mezzasalma hadn't bothered remembering the man's name. 

Still, it was irksome to have a dead body in the Octagon. They _ate_ in here. Hardly sanitary. He crossed his arms. "I hope you don't expect us to clean that up for you." There were limits, even for their new timekeeper. 

The newcomer - what had he said his name was? Tiktoffen, right. Tiktoffen - sighed. "If you'd rather leave a dead body on the floor, suit yourselves. What do you usually do with bodies?"

"The issue doesn't usually arise."

Tiktoffen raised a sceptical eyebrow. 

"It's not as if we could get them out of the pit traps."

From the table where a handful of them had been playing cards, Diaz looked up. "Actually, señor, I will take the body. I am in need of fresh _livianos_ for my research."

Tiktoffen nudged the moron's shoulder with his boot. It got a last rattling gurgle that sounded like it was trying to be a curse, but cursing effectively with a knife through your diaphragm was tricky. Tiktoffen yanked the knife back out - it let out a gush of blood that puddled onto the floor - and wiped it off on the moron's unmoving leg. It was a hunting knife with serrations on the blade, a butchering tool, not very scientific at all. "I think I nicked them, but you're welcome to try. Now, does anyone _else_ want to make trouble, or are you going to bring me Neuwenhoek's papers and perhaps we can all get out of here sometime this decade?"

He rather liked the man, Mezzasalma thought. Perhaps they'd invite him up to the lab to try out their distillations.

\--

"Those were the days."

"Indeed."

"We are all in agreement, _amigos_." 

"Absolutely," Snaug panted somewhere behind them, "but didn't it ever annoy the students?"

"Annoy? My dear, seven of them tried to murder me for it!" Mittelmind's face broke into a craggy grin. "Don't you remember that time at the University of Pisa?" 

"Older, sir," she said. It seemed to mean something to Mittelmind, because he nodded, waving a hand in apology. "I suppose students aren't as sturdy as minions."

"Students are a curse on the thinking man of science," Diaz growled. He had wandered over to inspect the painting on the opposite wall, a large and bloody depiction of the Ruin of Gilles-sur-Mer, with extra attention to the giant octopus. Loving attention, it was clear, from the gold dust the artist had speckled on its thrashing limbs. "I could have gotten tenure, if my students had not made so many petty complaints. As if I were neglecting their exams to spite them! My _rodillas de acero_ , they were at a delicate stage in their pupation!"

This was a new story. Mezzasalma skittered a little closer, while Mittelmind started to get the lamps lit and Snaug set down their first bundle of equipment. "How unfair," he offered. "Surely science should take priority."

" _Exactamente._ The zinc oxidation levels I had to adjust on the quarter-hour! There was scarcely time to eat, let alone deliver _paperwork_." The contempt dripped from his voice. "Although perhaps it was an overreaction to inject the departmental secretary with a - What's that noise?"

The noise was a dreadful crackling whimper, coming from Mittelmind or his chestplate or both, as he fell to the floor with a horribly offended expression. And he was only on the fifth lamp. 

"Doctor?" Snaug's skin was going pale and grey as she hurried to his side. She collapsed to her knees, feeling at his throat. Judging from the large brass dart stuck in it, that wasn't a likely proposition. It must have been neurotoxin to operate so fast. 

Mezzasalma clenched his fists. He hadn't done a resurrection in years. 

"Dreadful," Diaz announced. "And we were so sure this was a dead room. 

Snaug's eyes narrowed, and her fists were clenched as she stood up. It was beautiful, in its way, like a cornered mimmoth defending her young, forgetting that seven meters of height had been bred out of her hundreds of years before. "I need batteries," she announced. "Electric power. _Can you get me power?_ " She wasn't a Spark, her voice didn't crackle with madness, but still somehow Mezzasalma found himself leaping to answer it. Interesting effect. He'd have to tell Mittelmind when the careless fool woke up. 

It only took a minute; they pulled out the power supply while Snaug connected the wires of his chestplate, and then stood back while she flicked the switch. There was a flash, an sharp smell, and quite abruptly Mittelmind was blinking up at them, gasping for breath. "My," he said to no one in particular.

Diaz held up the dart. "You are lucky your minion is so well-trained," he informed Mittelmind.

What he was, Mezzasalma was inclined to conclude, was sensibly prepared. The luck came in finding a minion who would leap to revive him, instead of heading for the hills with the more portable, pawnable pieces of his lab equipment. Mittelmind didn't deserve such devotion. Mezzasalma would have to snatch Snaug from him at the first possible moment.

\--

"You're having me on, mate," the new convict said. He'd turned up in a rumbled merchant's redingcote and sullenly said "Nothing" when Roget the pirate asked what he'd done to get sentenced, and the betting pool had folded on the basis that it just wasn't fun if no one expected him to live past ten days. At least he would be fun to disillusion.

Mittelmind nodded solemnly, and pushed his bowl over in front of the new convict. "Their table manners are _impeccable_."

They'd agreed to do this one together, after the new convict had muttered about the cobwebs. It had seemed obvious. "I'm doing a study of their intellectual capabilities," Mezzasalma chimed in. "Do you know animals that prey on other predators tend to be the most intelligent? And these beautiful little things eat _human brains_."

"That's not really accurate," put in Krag from across the table. "I mean, they're the size of dinner plates, that's not exactly little -" He cut off as Mezzasalma's searching foreleg jabbed into his unprotected knee, as firm a _No poaching_ reminder as he could give without giving the game away.

Out loud Mezzasalma countered, "Little compared to the _Heteropoda supermaxima_. Or the _Mygale mordoria._ Those could eat a human brain in a single bite. But they're shy of the light and rely mostly on traps, and the knife-and-fork spider is an _ambush_ predator. Oh my. I don't advise brushing away cobwebs in here unless it's with a flamethrower."

The new convict was starting to look hunted. He hadn't touched the extra soup helping Mittelmind had so thoughtfully shoved over. Most everyone else was watching from the corners of their eyes, except Snapper, who was making his usual assortment of erotic digestive noises from the far end of the table.

Mittelmind picked up the thread cheerfully. "I can provide you with an excellent built-in flamethrower if you like," as if he'd give weapons to an unknown quantity, "and you'd find you didn't miss your left hand at all."

The new convict stuttered out, "I - I think I'd r - rather keep it, really."

"Then you'd best watch out while you sleep." Mezzasalma let his grin widen. 

"Oh yes. Strange things stalk the halls here."

"There are _voices_ in the walls."

"And as everybody knows -"

"You'd best keep on your toes," and they chimed in together for the last couplet, "or they'll have your blood for wine, in Castle Heterodyne!" 

By now the new convict looked on the edge of gibbering, but he rallied bravely. "Is - that your own composition?"

"Oh no! It's a local skipping rhyme. Amazing the influence of local tradition on children's subcultures, isn't it?"

"It's absurd," Mezzasalma pointed out. "Blood doesn't ferment."

Their test subject let out a whimper - just a tiny one, but it was enough to demonstrate they'd broken him. The rest was just observation of the decline. And they hadn't even lied, in the strict sense of the word, Mittelmind's theory that the truth was the most horrifying thing imaginable to the mundane mind was looking more and more plausible.

\--

The second time Mittelmind died in Castle Heterodyne, it wasn't Mezzasalma's fault. He wasn't even there. He was in the kitchen, demonstrating how to amplify jets of flame on the salamander to the pale, sulky vivisectionist who'd turned up with that afternoon's supply run, when Diaz burst in screaming for Snaug.

Once he'd snatched the carving knife out of the oven and abandoned the vivisectionist to gibber in the corner while the Castle laughed, Mezzasalma started back to their lab, just in case. He'd watched Snaug last time; the resurrection procedure would hardly be beyond his capabilities, if she couldn't be found. But not only was Snaug already there, she was already hooking up the Junior Scientist Lightning Kit they'd found in a spare bedroom last week. 

Tiktoffen turned up five minutes later while she was still picking up the bits of broken glass, and sighed at the sight. "I suppose we don't have an aetheric resonance inhibitor anymore."

"Never did," Mittelmind informed him, from the lab table where Mezzasalma had set him to be out of the way of the glass. "It did look quite similar until I tried to examine the flux diodes. I hope you weren't attached to that probe."

"We can send for another one." Tiktoffen scowled. 

Diaz was poking at the interior of the thing that had never been an aetheric resonance inhibitor, with a wooden broom handle rather than anything that might conduct electricity, and frowning at what he saw. Well, the poor man was a biomechanic, not an aetherics specialist; everything he knew on that front he'd picked up from studying the Castle systems like the rest of them. They really needed an _expert_. Maybe Jogliete out of Vilnius. Mezzasalma briefly contemplated the merits of trying to cajole Jogliete by letter into something the Empire would overreact to by sending her here, but that kind of persuasion was much easier in person.

Snaug had the last of the broken glass in the dustpan, and she carefully emptied it into the dustbin before she rounded on Tiktoffen, motherly-fierce again. "How many points?"

"What?"

"Points. Off his sentence. I think it was worth twenty."

He looked more confused than angry, like a man being viciously attacked by finches. "Points are for fixing things. This was rather the opposite of -"

"You told him to fix the inhibitor, and he _died trying._ Do you want us to hide in the Octagon all day until you die too?" She was as cross as Mezzasalma had ever seen her, which wasn't very. 

She also had an excellent point, and Mezzasalma tapped Diaz on the arm. "I'm certainly disinclined to work under those conditions," he pointed out to the room at large. "If we only get points for saying what you want to hear ..."

" _Si._." 

"That makes three of us," Mittelmind put in cheerfully. "Science is far from linear."

Tiktoffen glared at them in mute horror, like he was trying to decide which of them to shoot as an example to the others. In his peripheral vision Mezzasalma could see Diaz adjusting his magnetoconvulsor. There were too many ways to die in Castle Heterodyne but this, in all honesty, had not been the one Mezzasalma was expecting. "Ten," Tiktoffen said.

Right. It's not like the man was _losing_ points; in effect he created them ex nihilo.

Snaug crossed her arms. "Don't be insulting. Seventeen."

"Twelve."

"Sixteen."

"Fourteen."

"Deal." And her smile came back. "That only seems fair. What do you want high-power aetheric equipment for, anyway, sir? You never said."

Tiktoffen ran a hand through what little was left of his hair. "To determine the routing of the Castle's extranervous perceptual systems," he said, as if it should have been obvious to a minion. "We are trying to _fix_ it."

"Whatever happened to _the brain is in the generator room?_ " Mittelmind said, somehow managing to give the impression of an owlish blink through his goggles. "A homunculus map won't help us much until we can access the generator room. If it exists, that is," he threw in for a cheery afterthought."

Diaz put in, "You forget something."

"What exactly, pray tell?"

"You forget that Tiktoffen, he is mad."

It wasn't much of a joke. But all four of them had a good laugh anyway; they needed it. 

"Really, though," Mittelmind said, once they'd settled down. "What are you aiming at? These things need precise triangulation if you're using them on individual conduits, and we simply can't get to enough places to triangulate. You can't melt through a stone wall with the blood of peons. Whatever Doctor Rorgen thinks." He seemed abnormally cheerful for someone talking about how impossible a scientific procedure was; the fourteen points must have left him in a good mood.

"You're not thinking big enough," Tiktoffen said. 

"How large, precisely, are you thinking?"

"Where's the - you're sitting on it, aren't you. Get your big feet off the Castle map and I'll show you what I'm thinking."

Diaz and Snaug both lept over to help him down, but Mittelmind waved them off and lept, landing with a little bounce Mezzasalma was sure was exaggerated for effect. Or maybe he was feeling the post-revivification rush. He waved at the map with an unnecessary flourish. "As you please."

It must have infected Tiktoffen, too; he twirled the chalk before dashing off a circle right next to - Mezzasalma leaned closer - that giant caliduct they'd lost the Kalmarstad Strangler down. "Here's the first location we'll be targeting with the damper, _if_ we can find another one and fix it without frying ourselves," he said. Mittelmind looked indignant, but held his tongue. "And _here_ -" he touched three widely separated places - "are the places we'll put the damper lodes."

"Ah," Diaz crossed his arms. "Thus the power requirements."

Snaug blinked. "I thought they had to be equidistant from the target."

Tiktoffen twitched; perhaps he'd forgotten she was there. Or that minions could have brains. But he gamely explained, "They will be if we put the third one four stories up the staircase. R-79 can get through there, I think."

"Oh."

"It's a pity we can't get any further down the Corridor of Fish, or we could use the kitchen for one vertex."

Mezzasalma couldn't help but throw his hands in the air. "If you would send for a colony of _Portia polydoxa_ , we'd be past it in a few days! They're very trainable! I've been asking for months!"

"And I've been turning you down for months!" Tiktoffen's face twisted into a scowl. "The last thing we need is more vermin around the place."

\--

It was the dead of winter before their next Spark turned up; Mittelmind would pontificate about the effect of weather patterns on psychological stability at anyone who stood still too long, and Mezzasalma and Diaz practiced their terrifying laughs on the mundane criminals who turned up in the meantime. The population of the Castle was slowly increasing; they'd cleared out the most obvious ways to die. The new Spark - he gave his name as Medvjed, and looked the part - grumbled through dinner, but cheered up when they invited him to the chemical lab afterwards. When he tried Zonia's fortified cider, he unbent as far as, "Perhaps not everyone here is a waste of space."

"Only most of us?" Mittelmind, who preferred black coffee, raised his mug in a mocking salute.

"Present company excepted. But this is good." _For something made in a discarded washtub from rotten apples and bread_ went unspoken. "What does this Zonia fortify it with, anyway?"

"Bat blood."

"Really?" Medvjed raised one bushy eyebrow. 

"It used to be orphan blood." Mittelmind shrugged. "That's how she wound up in the Castle."

"No, I meant - how do you catch a bat to bleed it?" 

They'd heard her explain it often enough. "First," Mittelmind and Mezzasalma chorused, "you have to be smarter than the bat," and clinked their mugs together. 

Diaz rolled his eyes. "If you rather, I have some brandy I have made myself. The brandy has no blood at all." 

The new Spark shrugged philosophically. "For the next round," he proposed. 

An hour later Medvjed was singing folktunes in a shaky warble in some language none of the rest of them knew, ears waggling in time, while Diaz and Mittelmind hastily scribbled down the lyrics, Diaz on the chalkboard, Mittelmind in the back of a spare notebook. There had been a point to the exercise, but Mezzasalma had quite forgotten it. He was collapsed on the floor, unable to concentrate enough to keep his knee joints bent, which hadn't happened since the Baron's men got him with the tranquilizer gun, the bastards. Curious. He tried to lift a foreleg to examine the joint for mechanical failure, and found himself toppling over on top of that leg. 

When he awoke he was in the Cold Room, staring up at the frosty hams and lizard legs and squid tentacles on hooks, through a cloud of his own breath. His own carapace was poking him in the skull, and his back ached like it was on fire. Mezzasalma grabbed at his second legs for leverage as he tried to work back to some more comfortable posture, starting with _upright torso_. They burned cold to the touch. "What the devil was that?" he asked no one in particular.

There was a burst of laughter.

Right. The Cold Room was live, and that humanoid shape in the corner was the airman who'd pushed a two pilots out a hatch after a fight, been sentenced here, then called the Castle a windup toy that should just be bombed flat.

"That," said the voice, "was a very neat depancreasing."

The only way to deal with the Castle, Mezzasalma had come to think, was on its own terms: blunt and nasty. "I don't think that's a word." He tested his back knees; the scraping sound on the frost told him they were moving, even if he couldn't feel them.

"Oh? It probably should be." A heavy creaking, like the building was trying to sigh. "Maybe he was tired of corpses. I don't see why. Put them in the right place and they'll _ne_ v **er** _rot_." The echoes were all wrong, deeper than they should have been. 

Middle legs working. No time for the hydraulics diagnostic. Maybe once he was out of here. "You saw who did it, then?"

"Oh yes!" And now it was back to chipper. "Your Professor Diaz. The _biologist_." It loaded the word with contempt. 

Mezzasalma drew in his legs as close as they would go, and forced the pistons open all at once, a move that should have been as natural as lifting his hands. If he were a _portia polydoxa_ it wouldn't hurt so much, but then, he would have frozen to death by now. There were a few advantages to a mammalian metabolism, perhaps, at least as long as his so-called friends were going to try experimental sedatives on him and borrow his organs when there were perfectly good Sparkless prisoners who probably couldn't have found their own pancreas with both hands and certainly weren't using it for laboratory chemical synthesis. Well, he'd get some suitable vengeance. Once he thought of it. "I should go check his stitches," he offered. "Could you get the door?"

" _Ten!_ " the castle shouted, and the big wooden doors slammed open. What did - oh. Good thing he was so close to them. "Nine, eight ..."

Mezzasalma made it out on Two, panting and skittering and, he deeply suspected, bleeding out the surgical cut again, however good Diaz's stitches actually were. 

Damn wind-up rubbish heap.

\--

"Fraulein Snaug, surely he didn't mean with _heavy equipment_."

"I don't see why not." The strain in her shoulders was obvious, but Snaug sounded as cheerful as ever as she set down the crate. It went ping. "Doctor Mittelmind said to help with anything that wasn't dangerous."

"But this is -" Mezzasalma paused. It was minion work, certainly, but more the sort of minions you made by putting a dog's brain in a patchwork human body, trusting it to learn a few dozen two-word commands, feed itself, and whine if it needed fixing. Not a minion who could actually follow your experiments, like Fraulein Snaug. He wasn't sure how to articulate the difference. 'Construct work' wasn't it; constructs could be brilliant. He settled for, "Work any fool in the Castle could do."

"You used to make me move heavy equipment, sir."

"That was before R-79 was afraid of me," Mezzasalma pointed out. 

"Medvjed hasn't had time to make anyone afraid of him."

"Yes, and I don't want him getting ideas!" Mezzasalma waved vaguely at the assorted pieces of clankwork, the drill press, the multiaxial saw, the welding mask. "Until and unless the Heterodyne returns, _I_ am the ranking Spark of Castle Heterodyne, by right of seniority."

Snaug had snatched a crowbar from the nearest bench and began attacking the crate. It was labelled SNAILS IN CLARET 44KG in bright red stencil, but Mezzasalma wasn't surprised when the side fell away to reveal a spool of steel cable. "Doctor Mittelmind," Snaug informed him, between her deep breaths, "has told me he's the ranking Spark by superior numbers."

"By _what_?"

"Having the most minions. Which is one. But it still counts." 

Superior numbers. What a - clever argument. Hmm. "And on what basis," Mezzasalma asked, "does Diaz claim to be the ranking Spark?" 

"Something about firepower and sentence points. I wasn't really listening." She grinned at him. It looked completely sincere.

"Well," Mezzasalma answered, matching the grin with a friendly smile, "if you were my minion the issue wouldn't arise. I would have the superior numbers." 

"But I'm Mittelmind's." Snaug was blinking at him, as if she were waiting for him to explain his point. Clearly he would have to ease her gently into the idea. Break Mittelmind's hold on her mind. It shouldn't be difficult.

He began, "It's a matter of choice, though."

"What is?"

"Being Mittelmind's minion. You always have the option of walking away. Metaphorically, at least. Just not doing everything he tells you to, anymore." 

She tilted her head in confusion. 

"Why don't we go sit down and talk?" Mezzasalma waved at the chairs, which they'd piled under that hideous blue-and-purple excuse for a stained glass window. Snaug trailed him over without argument, and settled into the one upholstered chair that still had its seat while Mezzasalma settled onto the end table. "You're an excellent minion," he began. "You're astonishingly mentally stable. You anticipate. _Correctly_. And Getwin simply doesn't appreciate you properly."

"Sir, Doctor Mittelmind has never let me have cause to complain."

"Really? If he's willing to share, I'm not complaining, but surely he could do it with a little more discretion? If you were working for me, you wouldn't be moving crates like a clank-ape. You would be nudging the frontiers of science! Trying experiments that would give you inhuman capabilities!" She was practically twitching with excitement, so he pressed on. "You could command armies in my name! Once I get the _Portia polydoxa_ ," he added out of a sense of fairness; his and Mittelmind's best efforts together hadn't turned the knife-and-fork spiders tractable.

Snaug looked unreasonably nervous. "I'm not sure I want to command armies. I'm a minion."

"Well, you needn't if the idea doesn't appeal." He waved a hand. "But consider the rest of it."

She was considering. He could tell by the abstracted look. But it was scarcely eight seconds later when she jutted out her chin and answered, "Are you trying to convince me to leave Doctor Mittelmind for you?"

"That is _precisely_ what I am doing!"

"Then no." Snaug was clutching at the chair, but her face was firm. "I'm honored that you asked and you can always borrow me, it's fun, but I'm Doctor Mittelmind's minion and that's not going to change."

\--

It had probably had a name other than the Leaning Tower, but none of them knew it. The attack sixteen years ago had left it at a twenty-degree angle from the donjon. Most prisoners wouldn't set foot in the place. Only Mezzasalma with his superior arachnid stability, and Roget the air pirate with her experience of shifting decks, felt comfortable on the irregular floors. They were, therefore, the ones who found the body. 

Medvjed had been a big man, and he must have been moving fast for the curtain rod to go all the way through him like that. No wonder he hadn't turned up at dinner for two nights. Roget gave a heartfelt groan. "Of course the madboy gets himself impaled," she said. "Was he _trying_ to make it hard to get the body back? We'll have to go back for a hacksaw."

Mezzasalma frowned. "Probably not worth the bother. He's been dead too long for Diaz to get any use out of him."

"I don't want to look at that thing every time we come in here," Roget informed him. "It's not dry enough to mummify him."

"It's not as if we're in the Leaning Tower very often."

"More than once a century. Look, you don't have to help. I won't even complain to Tiktoffen about it. Just mix me up some more ferrocyanide rinse and we'll call it even. My roots are showing."

"Deal." Mezzasalma pushed sideways as he let go of the door; there was really no risk of landing on the curtain rod himself, the angles were all wrong, but it was a nerve-wracking sight regardless. "Do you know what he was doing here? The voices only started complaining about beam disintegration yesterday."

Roget shrugged, and tugged her toolbag up her shoulders before she pushed off, sliding across the floor on one foot to fetch up next to Mezzasalma at the opposite side of the room. Showoff. She wouldn't _need_ such good balance if she had a more sensible set of legs. But he'd been trying for two years now, and so far no one else had seen the advantages, not even the man with the wooden leg. Maybe he just wasn't explaining properly how _simple_ it was? 

It was obvious how unstable just two legs were. Medvjed had found that out the hard way, and twenty degrees wasn't even an extreme tilt. What had he come to the Leaning Tower for, anyway?

The thought nagged him, while they found the fire-damaged beam with assistance from an eerie doubled voice from two opposite walls, and shored it up, and replaced the gaskets in the heating system so it wouldn't catch on fire again. It nagged at him while they went back to fetch a hacksaw and report to Tiktoffen, who just gave a long rattling sigh and said, "Well, Sparks and sense don't go together. Damn the man, we could have used him next week.

Mittelmind said, when Mezzasalma took the news up to his lab, "We only knew him a few months, but Medvjed was our colleague. In the interest of maintaining the social bonds of ritual, we should hold a wake."

"A wake?" Diaz rolled his eyes. "When that Spark with the pig obsession died, we all heard you cheer. There was no wake for him."

"He only lasted four days," Mittelmind informed them with equanimity. "That's hardly enough to count as a colleague."

"Perhaps not."

"And that was before Zonia found the needle bees. We had no mead. A proper wake for a Spark takes mead."

"Your point, it is sensible," Diaz conceded. "By all means let us have a proper wake."

\--

It wasn't really meet to ask her to fan them with palm leaves, whatever sarcastic remarks Tiktoffen might have made - the man's temper had only gotten worse the longer the warm spell lasted - but they could ask Snaug to arrange better air circulation with rotary fans and some humidifying ductwork, and she set to it with good will. In a day's time their lab was almost comfortable again. Snaug wiped the sweat from her brow while Mezzasalma checked his knees for oil leaks; he'd gone through this once in Pisa, and the repairs had kept him busy until September. Mittelmind was already hogging the good chair just in front of the fan, of course. "Excellent job, my dear," he told her. "So helpful to have a minion who understands elementary mechanics." 

Snaug looked delighted by the praise. But Mittelmind was on a roll, or at least in a complimentary mood; he went on, "It is of such details that the greatest discoveries are made. I don't know where we would be without you."

"Down in the basements," floated Tiktoffen's voice from the doorway, "with the people who actually get things done around here."

They all twitched, but Snaug actually jumped a little. She made a quick recovery, though, and it didn't even take her any stammering to get out, "Professor! What is it? Is something the matter? You know you shouldn't come into a lab without knocking, what if we were testing noxious chemicals or deadfall physics or -"

"Shut up."

She shut up. Mezzasalma wasn't surprised to see Mittelmind's hands clenching into fists; his were doing the same.

"Maybe all the ordinary convicts are just exploring downstairs because they think it's cooler there, but they're actually finding things, which is more than you shirkers can manage. The survivors brought back a turbine switchgear. It's in Diaz's lab. He wants your help examining it. Go be useful." Tiktoffen jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Do it fast enough and I won't dock you points for bad behaviour."

At least they were being summoned to an interesting technical problem. Mittelmind grabbed his ultrasonic probe. Snaug, delightfully, grabbed the rotary fan.

The turbine turned out to be two meters tall, and Mezzasalma couldn't help but wonder why they'd bothered hauling it back up. Roget shrugged. "Tiktoffen sent us back for it," she said. "It wasn't easy getting the damned thing loose, either. Seriously, who uses rivets through a stone floor?"

"They say the old Heterodynes overbuilt everything." Mezzasalma brightens. "It's an elegant solution if you have the right kind of technical assistance."

"Well, I just hope there wasn't anything too important in the room underneath it. The acid gun worked great, by the way." Of course it had; he'd built it. Mezzasalma graciously nodded his thanks. 

Diaz put in, voice echoing oddly from inside the casing, "Alas that we cannot use it on the coupling guard. My grinder, please." He stuck a hand out from the depths of the turbine. Roget tossed him the grinder. Mezzasalma sidled over to examine the power intake; he could make out the oily silhouettes of the power lugs they must have had to disconnect to get the thing loose, which only made him wonder more why they'd bothered, if it had potentially still been functional _in situ_. And look, that thing just behind them with the enamel casing was the _same shape_ as a _Novak diode_ , and how fascinating was that since this thing had probably been _installed_ in the _fifteenth century_ , from the brasswork? Just how far _ahead of their time_ were the _Heterodynes_? He must have yelled for a prybar, because there was one in his hand and he was yanking the guard panel away.

The next few hours were a delightful blur. He couldn't hear his own twanging nerves over the whirr of Snaug's fan; she or Roget or for some reason Tiktoffen handed him tools as he called for them, and from the mechanical input side Diaz called out his observations, and Mittelmind gasped in delight and took little samples of each layer of enamel or insulating grease. It reminded him, painfully, of how it had felt to build his legs. 

Not until he ran his searching fingers into a coil of wire and they met Diaz's from the other side was the spell broken. Mezzasalma raised his head, blinking. Most of the turbine was in pieces, spread across the floor of Diaz's lab. Snaug was measuring the disconnected capacitor jars with a depth gauge; Mittelmind was sketching something with a look of intense concentration. Tiktoffen had a glass-coated resonance cylinder in one hand, tapping it on the other palm like a judge slamming his gavel for order or an officer drawing attention to his sidearm. Mezzasalma shook his head to clear it and tapped all his legs in a round to be sure none of them had come loose - they never did, he'd fixed that problem before he left Pisa, but the paranoid habit had stuck around.

"Good work, gentlemen," Tiktoffen informed them, and then conscientiously added at Roget's warning growl, "and ladies. It's eight o'clock and I'm sure Franz is tired of keeping our supper warm, assuming he hasn't added arsenic by now." He stuffed the resonance cylinder in his pocket and dusted off his hands.

Not until the heatwave was over, Roget had taken her points and left, and everyone still inside was distracted by the arrival of two new Sparks - one so far down the curve of sanity that Mittelmind and Diaz declined to bet on his surviving the week, but the other reasonably stable, with the aetherics background they had needed for so long - did it occur to Mezzasalma to wonder what Tiktoffen had needed the resonance cylinder for.

\--

Snaug held up the bundle. "I got this before they took inventory," she informed them. "So we shouldn't have any trouble."

"Lovely." Mittelmind was already pulling out a bag of flour, and then two long garlic braids. "We'll be eating decent food again before that incompetent wrenchman gets supper ready. Did you manage any potatoes, my dear?"

"Sorry, Professor."

"No matter. Next time." 

Mezzasalma put in, "Are we inviting anyone else, or is this just for the three of us?"

"After what Diaz did to my hydrophilic attractor? Certainly not. I'm not speaking to the man." Mittelmind crossed his arms and glared at the innocent bottle of olive oil he'd just pulled loose. "But do feel free to mention, if you see him choking down bits of boiled leather, that we're now making our own arrangements for supper."

"Yes, Doctor." Snaug set down the last bag - dried mushrooms, it said - and beamed. "This is going to be wonderful. I didn't know you could cook."

Wait. "What?" 

"Er," said Mittelmind. 

"Since when can you cook, Getwin? I do remember the Baklava Incident."

"I don't cook. It's minion work. Fraulein Snaug will be cooking for us."

Mezzasalma relaxed, but not very much, because apparently this came as a complete surprise to Fraulein Snaug. Her look of momentary panic would have been endearing, if it hadn't been on the best and only true minion in Castle Heterodyne. "But I don't know how!"

"Don't be absurd, you'll remember everything soon enough. You can't be worse than that Von Zinzer fellow." Mittelmind was, despite the easy words, looking a little nervous. 

"I mean I never learned!" If she were the sort of person who wrung her hands, Snaug would have been wringing her hands; as it was she was just twitching slightly. "That was my sister's job! The one time I tried to make a cake I set the chimney on fire!"

"Oh." Now Mittelmind looked lost.

Mezzasalma decided he'd better step in. Minion work it might be, but desperate times called for desperate measures. "It's just simple chemistry," he suggested. "I'm sure the three of us can experiment a little. We have ingredients," he waved a hand at the spread-out booty, "we have a heat source," he pointed at the hotplate, "we have a way to mix things together," or would if they made some non-standard attachments to the centrifuge. "Let's see if we can recreate the Malliard reaction."

Snaug looked a lot less panicked at this suggestion. 

An hour later, they stood gathered around the bench, watching their attempt at bread slowly, gracelessly collapse in on itself. It was a handsome shade of green, but Mezzasalma preferred his bread brown.

Mittelmind reached out to poke it with one finger. It left a dent. 

When it was about as collapsed as it could reasonably go, Snaug offered, "They probably won't notice if I just leave all the spare ingredients in the kitchen."

"Nonsense," Mittelmind declared. "This was only preliminary. It took five hundred attempts before Goldstein found the right conductor for modern death-ray resonator crystals. We must expect to stumble a little as we tread the frontiers of science."

Mezzasalma coughed. "Except this isn't a frontier. Plenty of people can make bread." Blunt, but just looking at their attempt was killing his appetite. 

"Nobody in the near vicinity. This Von Zinzer fellow certainly can't. You saw his oatcakes." They all winced at the memory. Rock-cakes would have been a more accurate name. "But he clearly has a certain resilience of mind, given that he didn't start gibbering, so who knows how long he'll be in the kitchen? Fraulein Snaug, take this away and fetch us a clean steel sheet."

\--

Diaz had been gloomy and terse for the past few months, but when he brought them the news there was, if not precisely a spring in his step, at least a little extra lightness around the heels. "Your theory of the Horror of Verity is demonstrated," he told Mittelmind, when he turned up to roust them from the lab. 

"How so?"

"The fellow you were tormenting yesterday, he is dead. Hanged himself from the rafter in the Gallery of Pikes. Tiktoffen is seeing to getting him cut down, and he wishes to know if you want any parts."

Mezzasalma swallowed his sudden seething jealousy, and clapped his friend on the shoulder. "Congratulations. Two days to a total breakdown - that's a new record." 

"And I hadn't even started on the story about the alimentary pit." Mittelmind was blinking in shock, his attempt at threading together a length of rubber hose, the methane nozzle, and a jar Mezzasalma hoped wasn't actually full of Genuine Preserved Pellicax's Twist, temporarily abandoned. "No parts, please, if you don't need anything we'll simply have to send him out in one piece. I suppose it's one way to get out of Castle Heterodyne in a hurry."

Diaz rolled his eyes. "Some people simply cannot adapt. Two days, really! We've all been trapped here for years, with no grant funding, no proper supplies, and one single minion for the three of us, and do we let that keep us from our work?"

"I beg your pardon." Mittelmind went stiff. " _I_ have a minion. I'm always happy to share, but she is _mine._ "

It occured to Mezzasalma that it was a good thing they were on opposite sides of the  
bench. The tension in the air was like a palpable force. Mittelmind would have had a better name for it; he was the social scientist, Mezzasalma preferred mechanics. He spun up his hydraulic pump, just in case he had to move quickly.

But quite abruptly, so fast it was suspicious, Diaz held up his open hands in surrender. "Of course. I meant to imply nothing untoward."

"Right." Mittelmind didn't quite seem to know what to do with his annoyance. He cleared his throat, and shuffled at some papers on the bench as if there was anything of importance there. "Just as long as we're clear on that."

They were.

But there was no rule against poaching, if Fraulein Snaug decided she was tired of Mittelmind's demanding possessiveness, and so Mezzasalma distracted himself from the five thousand little things he was worrying about, such as who had been responsible for Mittelmind's latest death if it wasn't the Castle being sadistic, and what exactly was the thing Tiktoffen was building in Diaz's lab, and why the knife-and-fork spiders were doing daring raids on their full-sized cooking knives, by constructing an automatic bottle-washer. Just a little something to make her job easier. 

She actually gasped when he pulled the cover off. 

Mezzasalma felt a swell of pride. "It operates at five speeds," he told her. "From delicate piping up to blast-away-enamel. Although I doubt you'll have much use for that one. We're not going to repeat the mess with the Hausugrad convertors."

"Thank you, sir!" She leaned in to twiddle the dials, face as bright as a Spark with a flash of inspiration.

Behind her Mittelmind rolled his eyes. "You know she's not going to defect?" he offered, sounding so casual it was easy to believe he meant it. "Fraulein Snaug is the most loyal minion I've ever had the pleasure of working with."

"I know, Getwin," Mezzasalma told him. "One of those til-death-do-us-part types. Consider this a thanks for all the loans."

What he didn't say, not in front of his friend, was: Considerably beyond death. She's brought you back from death so many times, it feels like an irrelevancy.

What he didn't say was: Next time you might die for keeps.

And if he did, Mezzasalma wanted first claim on Snaug. It hardly bore thinking about. They'd been through so much together by now. Shared a lab for three years, and that was impossible enough. If Mittelmind ever died - well - nobody else would know what it meant to Snaug. Nobody else would take care of her.

\--

The arch of what they'd been informed was the Mechanicsburg Municipal Squid Works loomed overhead, and the milling engines stood silent, ready to thrum back to life as soon as they were needed. It felt so good to be in the open air again, even if they weren't, strictly speaking, out of reach of Castle Heterodyne. But then, it was acting much more reasonable since the Lady repaired it.

She'd promised to _read_ all their _research proposals_. Mezzasalma was still thrumming with the thought of it, despite everything, Diaz gone and Tiktoffen revealed as a traitor and Von Zinzer astonishingly, a competent chief minion. That one he was still getting used to.

It wasn't quite as disconcerting as being out of Castle Heterodyne. 

But - they were still alive. Free to take up their research again, once the present crisis was over. And that meant they'd need somewhere to work. Von Zinzer was directing the removal of a giant metal plate in the floor, Snaug was sorting the spare cabling, and the Sparks had a moment of free time. Mezzasalma sidled up to Mittelmind - he had given up on moving silently years ago, but the scraping of metal and the noises in the street covered it - and touched him on the shoulder. It was deeply satisfying to get a startle reflex from someone already dead.

But it only lasted a second, and then Mittelmind relaxed. "Caractacus? What is it?"

"I have a proposal," Mezzasalma explained.

Not until the break below the Squid Works was repaired and they were tromping down the street behind Von Zinzer did they get the chance to explain matters to Snaug. She watched Von Zinzer with a possessive expression that made Mezzasalma glad they'd be staying in Mechanicsburg; it would make things easier. Well, he wished her all the best. She was a chief minion too, or would be once they pick up some more minions; it was only suitable. Which brought up the point.

He coughed, and when he'd gotten her attention back from the Lady's fascinating minion, saif, "We have something to tell you, Fraulein Snaug."

She blinked a few times, glancing back and forth between them. "We?"

"Yes. And it concerns you as well. Getwin and I have decided to stay in Mechanicsburg and set up shop here. It's such a lovely town. A place where they really appreciate science."

Mittelmind was grinning. "I expect you don't have any objections to that?"

"Oh no. None at all." In fact Snaug looked absolutely delighted at the prospect. She even added, "It'll be nice to have Professor Mezzasalma so close."

"Ah." Mittelmind coughed. "He'll be _extremely_ close. We're going to set up shop together, and be lab partners."

"Really?" Snaug was almost breathless.

Mezzasalma said, "It worked so well for us in the Castle, we may as well keep going with it. I've gotten used to having someone whose ideas I can pick holes -" But he didn't finish the sentence, because Snaug had dropped her toolbag to give him a sudden, crushing embrace, squealing in sheer delight.

She added, "Congratulations," while he was still catching his breath, and spun around to give Mittelmind a hug as well. "You're going to have _so much fun_ together."

Of course Mezzasalma had seen her so casually affectionate with Mittelmind, but he'd never been on the receiving end of one of her hugs before. Well, there were worse side effects finding a lab partner could have than hugs from a friendly young woman, especially one deft enough to dodge all his legs. Most people who tried to get close to him didn't know where to step. 

Up at the front of the column Von Zinzer was wondering aloud if anyone could _see_ the Big Green Fountain they were supposed to turn left at, or if they should assume it was under the collapsed brick building. R-79 began tossing bricks out of the pile, presumably in order to check. The three of them all scuttled backwards to keep out of his way. R-79 was stronger than he was precise.

"Uh." Snaug ducked as a particularly hard-flung chip of cement whizzed over her head. "Professors? Can you promise me one thing?"

"Possibly," Mittelmind allowed, because he had developed enough sense not to say _of course_. "What do you need, my dear?"

"Final veto on hiring decisions," she promptly declared.

They looked at each other over her head, until the next piece of tile hit Mittelmind in the side of the head and stuck there. He winced and tried to shake it loose. Fortunately, it matched his goggles.

"I think," Mezzasalma told her, "we'd better leave them to you entirely."

\---

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the They Might Be Giants song 'No One Knows My Plan'.


End file.
